The War on Christianity

Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad.

As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaeda stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of mass murder.

When security forces broke in, the killers threw grenades to finish off the surviving Christians and detonated explosive-laden vests to kill the police. The toll was 46 parishioners and two priests killed, 78 others wounded, many in critical condition after losing limbs.

Within 48 hours, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia issued a bulletin: “All Christian centers, organizations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the (holy warriors).”

It was the worst massacre of Christians yet. For Assyrian Catholics known as Chaldeans, whose ancestors were converted by St. Thomas the Apostle, the U.S. war of liberation has been seven years of hell.

Estimates of the number of Christians in Iraq in 2003 vary from 800,000 to 1.5 million. But hundreds of thousands have fled since the invasion. Seven of the 14 churches in Baghdad have closed, and two-thirds of the city’s 500,000 Christians are gone.

While Saddam Hussein, a secularist, had protected religious minorities, Muslim vigilantes — Shia, Sunni and Kurd, as well as al-Qaeda — have attacked the Christians who have endured kidnappings, pillage, rapes, beheadings and assassinations.

And what has happened to this Christian community, which had lived peacefully alongside Muslim neighbors for centuries, must be marked down as one of the predictable and predicted consequences of America’s war in Iraq.

In editor Tom Fleming’s Chronicles, just days before President Bush ordered the invasion, columnist Wayne Allensworth warned pointedly:

“Iraqi Christians fear they will be the first victims of a war that might dismember their country, unleashing ethnic and religious conflicts that Baghdad had previously suppressed. Tariq, a Christian merchant in Baghdad, told the French weekly Marianne that ‘If the United States goes to war against our country … (t)he Wahhabis and other fundamentalists will take advantage of the confusion to throw us out of our homes, destroy us as a community and declare Iraq an Islamic nation.’

“If recent history is any indication, Tariq has cause for concern,” wrote Allensworth. “The Shiite uprising in southern Iraq during the first Gulf War — encouraged and then abandoned by Washington — targeted Christians. Many Christians had supported Saddam’s regime, in spite of creeping Islamicization, as their best hope of survival in the Islamic Middle East.”

“We let the Shia genie out of the bottle,” said a rueful Yitzhak Rabin after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah.

We Americans did the same with our wars against Saddam’s Iraq.

Why is Christianity being murdered in its cradle by Muslim fanatics?

Multiple reasons. A return of Islamic militancy. The rise of ethnic nationalism that conflates tribal and religious identity. Hatred of America for its domination of the region, for our war on terror that they see as a war on Islam and for our support of Israel in its suppression of the Palestinians.

Christians across the Middle East are now seen as both members of an alien religion and a fifth column of the Crusaders inside their camp.

Paul Marshall of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom warns that we may be in another great wave of persecution, “as Christians flee the Palestinian areas, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt.”

Christians are gone from Jerusalem, gone from Nazareth, gone from Bethlehem. From Egypt to Iran, the Vatican counts 17 million left.

“Across the Middle East,” writes Robert Fisk in The Independent, “it is the same story of despairing — sometimes frightened — Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions.”

In an essay titled in Christ’s own words, “Whoever Loses His Life for My Sake …” columnist Doug Bandow writes,

“Although Christians are no longer tossed to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, believers are routinely murdered, imprisoned, tortured and beaten. Churches, businesses and homes are regularly destroyed. The opportunity to meet for worship and prayer is blocked. There is real persecution rather than the cultural hostility often denounced as ‘persecution’ in America.”

America remains the most Christianized of the Western nations. Yet, the protests of the White House, State Department and major media over the eradication of Christianity in the Middle East is muted.

Where is the outrage? What happened to the America whose president, with a British prime minister in Placentia Bay, on the eve of war sang with his sailors, “Onward Christian Soldiers”?

Are we so wary of offending Muslim sensibilities or inflaming Muslim rage we cannot denounce the pogroms perpetrated against Christians in the name of Allah?

Of what worth these wars for democracy if we end up freeing fanatics to annihilate communities or expel populations of our own Christian brothers and sisters across the Middle East?

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29 Responses to The War on Christianity

We didn’t make too much noise about the old Communist states killing and imprisoning Christians, about the Israelis killing, imprisoning and driving out Palestinian Christians, or about the persecution – with what amounts to official sanction, including regular communal massacres – of Christians taking place right now in India. In fact the President’s over there right now enjoying himself.

Not to mention China, Rwanda and so on.

One lesson of all this is that if al Qaeda restricted itself to Christian targets there would probably be no War on Terror, given that many of our “allies” kill and dispossess Christians without much protest from us.

Another lesson is that Christians should do the sensible thing and live in Christian countries. Unfortunately that doesn’t include the United States because if the US were a Christian country it would make the Jews nervous, and it would distract us from being a secular state devoted to raising money and troops to defend Israel so that Israel can be a Jewish state.

Pat, the blame for this indifference to Middle Eastern suffering by Americans can be placed squarely with your own Republican Party and the American Christian Evangelicals, who are at the forefront of equating Christianity with being White and European and promoting anti-Arab bigotry. Europeans have consistently seen their religion as being intertwined with their ethnicity. Hence, even the Crusaders didn’t bother differentiating between Arab Orthodox Christians, Muslims or Jews when they wanted to “liberate” Jerusalem as they probably thought that one bunch of dark skinned towel heads is much the same as the next. That fine tradition lives on in modern US Christianity.

Perhaps if George W. Bush had done some serious contemplation of the consequences of his decision to engage the USA in another land war in the middle east, the Iraqi Christian population would still be whole, 5000 US and allied soldiers and 100,000+ Iraqi civilians would still be alive, the millions of displaced Iraqis would not be displaced, the tens of thousands of physically and mentally impaired US and allied soldiers would be normal, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi orphans would have parents and the taxpayer account would not be set back to the tune of 1 trillion+ dollars.

But our intellectually challenged ex-president was brainwashed by his neocon handlers into thinking that he would go down in the history books as the man who brought democracy to the Arab world. And the U.S. congress went along with this charade.

Acts of condemnation, prayers and cooperation are enough at this point. There is no need to add to the current irrationalities of the conflict in Iraq by exporting more emotions and identity politics. This is not a case of a State versus citizens. This is a case a rouge and fringe group against citizens, order and government. 99% of Iraqis are more eager than you to get rid of extremists, many of them foreigners. They are in the middle of this, Muslim and Christian together, in their loss, mourning and rage. Any alien provocation is not needed and frankly feels annoying and insensitive.

I think there are two points that can be made. And they are not disjoint. The first is that the American Empire Project is indeed obsolete and unaffordable. And yes, it does inflame the occupants of the countries we decide to invade and inhabit.

The second point is that the great arc of Islam that spans across Northern Africa into South Central Asia is inchoate and retrograde. The Muslim response to human rights atrocities and political pathology spans the range of active collaboration to indifference to learned helplessness.

Where are the Islamic Gandhi or Martin Luther King to rescue Islam from its dysfunction? Where are the Islamic neighbors of the persecuted Christians marching in solidarity with them against the murderers?

America should retreat from the Middle East. Not just because the Imperial model does not work, but also because the dysfunction may be intrinsic.

Steve M
Christianity survived 1400 years of Islam in the middle east,but will not survive the wind of American democracy.
Retrograde Islam was just fine, it is Western Democracy that is spelling the end of Christianity

You have a situation where Muslims all over the world see Americans–quite rightly–as agents of Israel. Where many go wrong is in the conflation of all Christians, even those indigeneous to their own countries, into clients of the “Christian” U.S., and, thus, agents of Israel themselves.

Raashid, I don’t know if you are Orthodox or if you are a muslim, but either way you are ignoring a major point about the Crusades and medieval history. In 1054, the Great Schism broke the Eastern and Western Churches in two, leaving each calling the other heretics. So when western “Latin” Crusaders were killing Arabs, they were, in their opinion, heretics or heathens. Keep in mind the when the Crusaders found the Maronites in the hills of Lebanon they were welcomed because they acknowledged the Pope, i.e. they were in the Latin Camp. I also bring your attention to the fact that many Arab Christians were part of Churches that were denounced as Nestorian or Monophysite centuries before the Crusades. In conclusion, the Crusaders did not kill all Arabs because they were brown but because they were either heretics or heathens.

The Church age has come to an end any way. You can get the truth or facts at this web site.http://www.familyradio.com/ You won t find this teaching in your church. A matter of fact they ll have you removed from your churches.

Thanks for the insight Publius, you may have answered Pat’s question for him. The American Evangelicals are probably the only Christians that put much stock in their religious identity, so are probably not bothered about the wrong sort of Christians getting killed (though I stand by theory that their color is also a factor amongst these Evangelicals, even it it weren’t for the Frankish Crusaders)

It comes down to this. When Christian zealots storm mosques, execute Imams, and blow themselves up in the name of Christ, I might take a closer look. Terrorism is not about “faith” it is about control and power. Have you ever seen the film “The Untouchables”? Pay attention to Sean Connery’s character, Jimmy Malone. The alpha and omega of his relationship with Elliot Ness is presented via the line; “…what are you prepared to do?” (to take down Al Capone).

…and America is not done yet, we have Iran squarely in out sights.
I hope someone will do a census of Iranian Christians now, so we know how many became homeless when the next US President decides to export democracy to Iran.

Many will now blame the policy of George W Bush for the massacre of Christians. In fact, the only thing that has happened is that the true nature of Islam is being revealed for what it is – an evil, intolerant, and hate-filled so-called religion. Islam is a religion of peace just as communism is a philosophy of love and tolerance.

To offer a simplistic answer, the victimization of Christians gets as much attention as it deserves, given the scale of the victimization. In other words, if 1% of the victims of persecution in Iraq are Christians, then they deserve 1% of the attention.

I suspect that the victimization of Christians actually gets more attention than the numbers would justify.

I blame the increased persecution of Middle Eastern Christians and lack of condemnation thereof on the Israel Lobby and their Neocon and Demoncrat lackeys. It is hypocritical to condemn the persecution of indigenous Christians in the Middle East when you’re pursuing policies that inevitably hurt these communities more than necessary. All that in the name of Democracy and out of a misguided and fanatical support for a “Jewish State” that in reality could not care less about our indigenous Middle Eastern Christian brothers and sisters. Seriously, stop being their Useful Idiots.

Matthew 12:43-12:45 “When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

Iraq wasn’t swept clean and put in order but more wicked evil spirits are taking it over now. Saddam was bad, but these leaders will be worse. When we took on the Kaiser in World War I to make the world safe for democracy we got Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The question is who would the Iraqi Christians vote for? Their live under Saddam or their live now. My money is on the former.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein donated a large amount of money to renovate a Chaldean church in Detroit.

We then supported Hussein in the largest land war since WW2 when the occupiers of U.S. soil, Iran (any embassy overseas in considered soil of its representative country, and when Iran occupied our embassy with the fall of the Shah it was no different than them invading the U.S.) and Iraq warred with each other.

In 1991 in what was a clearly regional dispute between Iraq and Kuwait George Bush Sr. decided to throw the full weight of the U.S. military against what was basically our former ally Hussein in large part on behalf of his oil masters, Saudi Arabia. And thus was Al Quedda born, in response to the U.S. presence on Saudi soil.

U.S. chaplains at the time were required to cover-up any cross or star-of-david to prevent ‘offending’ our ‘hosts.’

In order to validate it all later, George W. Bush then used the excuse of Hussein having WMDs to oust him from power and in doing so unleashed the full fury and mayhem of Islamic terror against all things ‘un-Islamic’ in that region.

Under his vision of ‘Democracy’ as the new world order substitute for faith and religion Bush succeeded in doing what no one had been able to do for centuries, he united Shia Iran with Sunni Wahabist Saudi Arabia’s most extreme elements.

OK, we know Drones really do much of the so-called suicide and car-bomb killings in the Af-Pak theater. Could it be that drones are also decimating the Christians and their churches in order to galvanize support from the US evangelicals to continue our presence there? After all, it is these duped Bush-Palin fanatics that serve as the grass-roots support for our continued actions there.
All this while the NeoCon puppeters are laughing, along with Bush who is redeemed by his image of being merely a “dupe.”
Pat, why aren’t you more strident about this reality?

Do you even read the article? What drones? 8 terrorist entered the chirch and killed people. What drones???

Those that are flying in the empty vastness of some people’s sculls?

US just removed the dictator – Saddam – which was oppressing everyone, every religion equally. Now as the muslims are free to do whatever they want, they are just showing their colors. Killing and economical opression did not happen just in 21 century – violence against Christian was always there flaring up and dying down periodically, depending on who the ruler was.

To Ricketson. This is not a matter of percentage, this is not a quantitative issue, this is a qualitative one THis is a matter of eradication of indigineous people of this land. It is like Native Americans would be killed and their reservations were invaded and bombed now, and the world is silent. And who reduced Christians – Assyrians, Chaldeans and other minorities – to being 5% of population in their own land? The followers of “religion of peace”. WHy won’t you go and educate yourself before writing cynical comments.

Interesting comments here. Why is it we blame ourselves for the evil that other people do? It’s not “our fault”…whatever the hell that means….that Middle Eastern Muslims have attacked Christians. It’s their own damn fault because they made the choice to do so.

If the roles were reversed, would you say it’s the Muslim’s fault? Give me a break. There are some great reasons for the U.S. NOT to be in the Middle East…using sh*tty logic that implies foreigners cannot control their own actions is not one of them.

Ah I love it when the majority cries about being persecuted and then tries to take other peoples right’s away. I really don’t understand why you Christians seem to need the government to endorse your religion.